Description: Discusses the severe adverse effects on U.S. capital markets that will occur due to the passage of FAS 115, which requires marking certain assets to market without a corresponding adjustment to liabilities.

Description: This article describes activities of the Board of Governors to strengthen the role of research within the SOA. The Board actions include approving two additional professional staff positions for the Research Department and including $150,000 in a Research Development Fund to serve as seed money for research projects.

Description: This article is about a seminar held on October 30, 1997 to discuss mortality improvement in the NAFTA countries and the impact of such improvements on the financing and benefit adequacy of the countries’ individual social security systems. The gathering of about 80 researchers from a variety of disciplines served as a type of summit meeting on the NAFTA countries’ mortality projections. The seminar was Phase 2 of a three-phase SOA research project, 'Impact of Mortality Improvement on Social Security: Canada, Mexico, and the United States.' The project is intended to provide some guidance for appropriate governmental bodies to use in determining future financing and benefit needs for social security. It is sponsored by the SOA, The Actuarial Foundation [formerly the SOA Foundation], the Retirement Research Foundation, the American Society of Pension Actuaries, the social security administration of each NAFTA country, and the Pension Research Council.

Description: Article from The Actuary, November 1998 – volume 32 - Issue 9: Planning is progressing for the SOA conference “Fair Value Accounting for Insurance Companies,” March 18-19, 1999, at New York University (NYU), and some exciting new wrinkles have recently arisen.

Description: In this paper, presented at the Eastern Spring Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held March 24-25, 1960 in Washington, D.C., the author documents the determination of elementary functions and monetary values of the 1941 CSO Mortality Table on an age last birthday basis, noting that until this time the tables had been published only on the basis of age nearest birthday. The impetus of this change was the author’s company, Metropolitan Life, having recently started issuing ordinary life policies on an age last birthday basis, the rational being the use of age nearest birthday had led to policyholder confusion and misunderstanding. Includes discussion. From the 1960 Transactions Vol. 12, No. 33.

Description: The author describes immunization with a simple illustration requiring only high school algebra rather than the ordinary and stochastic calculus that has been applied to this subject. It illustrates that if you have three invesmtents with different durations, we can take some combination of any two of them to get the same duration as the third.

Description: A discussion about the possible future effects of AIDs/HIV on the life insurance industry.

Description: The final actuarial work of the renowned Briton, Frank Redington. was a series of essays called “The Flock and the Sheep.” They were reviewed here some months ago by Kenneth Stewart. These articles describe what could be characterized as the problem of incidence of earnings on investments inequities. While equities produce the greatest returns over a long time, they tend to have lower returns than debt for the first years of the investment.

Description: This article notes that the SOA has been accepted as an affiliate member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS. The author believes this affiliation helps support the concept of an actuary being both a business person and a scientist.

Description: In this article, the author exhorts the actuarial community to move toward a more research-oriented culture, much like that which exists in the UK.